


As Time Goes By

by apocketfulofwry



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Petyr is scared shitless, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 11:05:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13879542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocketfulofwry/pseuds/apocketfulofwry
Summary: Petyr Baelish doesn't believe in soulmates.Until one day, he does.





	As Time Goes By

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ophelia_Raine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ophelia_Raine/gifts).



> Happy birthday, you. I'm no good with greetings and shit, so this fic will have to do.
> 
> Hey, that rhymed!

Petyr’s timer appears just a few days shy of his 22nd birthday.

At first he thinks he is mistaken. He cannot have a soulmate. Eighteen had come and gone, and no timer had etched itself into his wrist.

But there, just beneath his watchband is the faintest outline of numbers. A shade of blue, so pale as to mimic the pulse of blood beneath his skin. He feels it itch, feels it burn though he knows it’s all in his head.

Around him, life goes on. Tyrion drunkenly monologues on beauty and women, completely oblivious.

Petyr Baelish has a soulmate.

\--

The thing is, Petyr can’t have a soulmate.

It wasn’t unheard of, people never meeting their soulmates. Of course there was one for everybody. It just so happens that sometimes they never meet. In some cases, one dies before meeting the other and the poor sod has to watch the numbers blink out of existence and continue on living knowing what they’ve just lost.

Petyr stopped believing in soulmates when he was fourteen. Lying there, bloodied on the pavement with the wind knocked out of him, watching the girl of his dreams walk away with the bastard of his nightmares.

Love sucked.

\--

At night, in his sleep, the numbers rearrange themselves underneath his skin, writhing like worms until reaching their final form. Petyr feels trapped by time.

His dreams are filled with visions of women. Shades of blonde and brunette, of women with hair and eyes of black and skin a pantone of flesh and brown.

Petyr never dreams of gingers. He hasn’t looked at a redhead since Catelyn.

In the mornings, bleary-eyed, he holds his arm up to his face before anything else, the ever-changing numbers the first thing he sees on waking.

Daily, the countdown continues.

Petyr is terrified.

\--

The numbers grow darker.

They peek out from beneath his cheap digital Timex like a botched tattoo.

Today, Petyr realizes they’ve become a shade of black so dark they seem to suck the light in from their surroundings. His wrist aches with phantom pain. He imagines if he stares too long the timer will have burned a hole into his skin, down into an endless universe where whoever falls will never touch bottom, will continue to tumble down into eternity.

He flips his left arm wrist side down and tries to concentrate on the screen in front of him.

Focus.

\--

This soulmate thing is not all it’s cracked out to be.

Petyr expects it to give him a sense of purpose, of rejuvenation. Something to strive for and look forward to.

So far, it’s been nothing but a fucking distraction. Watching the numbers count down, knowing his soulmate is over a decade away.

With his bonus, he goes and purchases his first ‘decent’ watch. A Tudor Black Bay with snowflake hands and a wide, 22mm strap that covers his timer quite nicely. It is the sort of watch that wears well with leather or a steel bracelet, with jeans or a suit. A watch for a young man moving up in the world.

Petyr’s less distracted now.

\--

Petyr makes certain he wears long sleeved shirts in public all the time.

He develops a taste for suits, for fine linen and bespoke cufflinks.

He develops a taste for watches. Exquisitely crafted timepieces, the numbers on their face vying for attention with the numbers on his wrist.

Today, a silver mockingbird glimmers from his shirt cuffs in the faint light of the bar as he raises a glass of scotch to his lips in celebration of his birthday.

It is the same bar when he realizes that his timer had come to life.

It’s been over a decade.

Petyr is a patient man.

\--

Time passes and Petyr has come to make peace with the inevitable. In a way it feels like a betrayal of his one and only love. On the flipside, he knows that Catelyn and he were never meant to be. It took the numbers to show him that somewhere out there, was a little bird who sang the same song as he. They just had to find and perch on the same tree.

The company he and Tyrion Lannister founded makes it to the Fortune 500, and still the timer keeps on counting backwards.

Sometimes he lies awake, so late into the night that it skates on the edge of morning, watching their forms change, this darkness gliding beneath his flesh.

He imagines the eight to be a serpent eating its own tail.

\--

On the day the numbers hit 00 on the years, Petyr had been so busy overseeing the setup of their London offices that he almost missed it. If he hadn’t spilled his drink over his watch and taken it off to wipe it down, he would have awoken the next day and perhaps given himself a heart attack when he saw how little time he had left.

As it is, he locks himself in one of the offices – still devoid of furniture – with half a Jack Daniels and proceeded to swig the rest of it straight from the bottle.

Tyrion finds him on the floor the next morning, clutching the empty bottle to his chest. The hangover is so bad that Petyr can’t bring himself to care about soulmates or timers or forever.

Mission accomplished.

\--

The countdown hits 00 on the months and Petyr goes on a two-week long bender of women and drink. It’s so completely unlike him that Tyrion personally comes to fetch him from Chataya’s and give him a verbal smackdown to stop acting like, well, him. There was only room for one womanizing alcoholic in their partnership and that slot was taken already, thank you very much.

Petyr then realizes that he could have drank and whored his way past his soulmate in an alcohol-fuelled haze of anxiety.

Also, Catelyn Stark nee Tully has just sent them both an email with a request to take on her oldest daughter, Sansa, as an intern in their company.

It is that thought more than the booze that makes him vomit all over Tyrion’s shoes.

\--

The weeks count down to 00 and Petyr has decided to organize a hostile takeover of another multinational corporation that would be tantamount to suicide should he ever decide to push through with the attempt.

Tyrion once more comes to the rescue by calmly pointing out that taking on Tywin Lannister would not only be very foolish, it might lead to both their deaths.

That he does this after standing up on Petyr’s desk and throwing an uppercut that would do Bronn proud possibly had something to do with Petyr coming to his senses.

He’s not sure if Tyrion just saved his life, or doomed him.

He presses an ice pack to his jaw and looks uneasily at his wrist.

\--

The days hit 00 and Petyr decides he’s gone insane. This day has been on his mind for almost two decades and now that it’s come he just doesn’t know what to do with himself. He opens up an email and tries to answer it; the words made unintelligible by the jumble his thoughts have taken.

He tries to pace, but gives up after a few laps.

He swims until he’s exhausted, and sits on the steps of his infinity pool, watching the sun rise in the horizon and rubbing at the numbers on his wrist with a thumb, as if he could erase what has been predestined.

\--

Ultimately, he decides to go in for work. If this soulmates thing were for real it didn’t matter if he chose to barricade himself in a research station in Antarctica. With his luck, he’d wind up being soulmates with a penguin. Though with that thought, perhaps he’d been better off scheduling a visit to a beauty pageant.

The hours trickle down to 00 and a sense of calm settles as he prepares to face the inevitable. He allows himself to wonder what she would be like. Would she be kind? Could she find something to love in an old man like him? Granted, 40 wasn’t ancient but – wait, would she even be young? What if she were some crone who had waited all her life for him? What if it was a _him_?

Petyr felt the air sucked out of his chest, as it had been the day Brandon Stark had decked him and showed that fists and a pretty face would always get the girl.

He bolts to the nearest supply closet and locks himself in it.

\--

The minutes run out to 00 and Petyr is alone in the office pantry. The closet had become stuffy after half an hour and he found himself in need of a drink of water, for some caffeine to calm his nerves. He’s been awake for over 36 hours, unable to sleep since the night before. His heart feels like it could beat out of his chest but he’s never felt steadier in his life.

Petyr is a wreck. He stares at his left wrist, clutching tightly at his watch with his hand, watching the numbers on both timepiece and skin go down.

Seconds to go and the bloody office Muzak has started to play ‘As Time Goes By’. Petyr could weep from the cheesiness and stress of it all.

He hears the click of heels and braces himself to face his future, face his forever.

\--

Sansa has been on edge the whole day.

First day on the job in her dream company and she didn’t have the heart to tell her mum that today was the day she was supposed to meet her soulmate! I mean, how was he supposed to find her when she was trapped in an office with a bunch of stuffy old men? Don’t get her wrong. To work for Petyr Baelish and Tyrion Lannister was a dream come true, but come on, mum! _Today_ of all days.

In the end, her innate practicality won out. The opportunity to learn from the best triumphed over the potential to find love and she threw herself into absorbing everything that she could.

Tyrion Lannister himself had shown her around, but Sansa remained distracted by the timer on her wrist though she did her best to concentrate on her orientation.

The minutes counted down to 00 and Mr. Lannister excused himself to take a call.

Sansa worried at the numbers with her right hand, rubbing around the cuff of her wrist as she walked absently to what Mr. Lannister had earlier pointed out as the pantry for this floor. She needed to be alone with her thoughts.

Only she wouldn’t be alone.

A man sat with his back to the door, staring at a watch he held in his left hand, the sleeve of his shirt rolled up to show the numbers on his left wrist hit 00 and fade.

Oh.

“Hi,” she said tentatively, hand raised in a small wave. Ridiculous, considering he hadn’t even seen her.

He leapt up suddenly, knocking his chair to the floor and whirled around to face her, a look of clear panic on his face. He was older. She hadn’t expected that. But his was a face she had seen a hundred times in the papers, on the news. She’d watched countless hours of footage of him, memorized interviews and absorbed the lessons he’d inadvertently imparted during Q&As. Heck, she’d even written a paper on him during grad school.

Right now, he was blinking at her, looking just as stunned as she felt.

“I’m Sansa Stark.” She offered a hand to shake. He took it, his grey-green eyes looking right into hers as he walked slowly closer, into her personal space.

It should have felt like an invasion.

It felt like coming home.

“Petyr Baelish,” he rasped. So unlike the smooth cadence on the telly.

“I know,” she smiled impishly.

As he smiled back, Sansa felt a sense of rightness descend upon her.

This was going to be the start of something beautiful.


End file.
